The Union for Democratic Communications is dedicated to the critical study of ascendant, emergent, oppositional, democratic, and experimental forms of media, their production and distribution, and the development of local, regional and international systems of democratic communication. In this spirit, the organizers of the 2015 Toronto conference propose that participants engage with the theme of circuits of struggle.

Contemporary communication practices are marked by struggle. On the one hand, we live amid neoliberalism and austerity and the challenges these structures impose on democratic life, including precarity, debt, and enclosure. Capitalism has integrated communicative activity and digital technologies into a logic of accumulation that exploits all forms of the commons: the environment, languages, affects, information, and knowledge. Technological innovation makes possible new forms of surveillance and corporate control over these resources. On the other hand, this integration is incomplete. Individuals, organizations, and collectives are using these same technologies to fight back. Struggles for higher wages, less work, social justice, and a better quality of life are occurring worldwide. Those who struggle against domination are communicating across new channels in innovative and creative ways.

In this context, the 2015 conference organizers ask participants to engage in conversation about the nature of contemporary media, communication, and technological struggle, and the possibilities for transforming the contemporary neoliberal order.

We welcome proposals from emerging and established scholars, graduate students, activists, media makers, workers, and artists for presentations that speak to the theme or related issues in democratic communications, including new media and technologies, media and tech activism, policy, histories, gender and race, work and labour, social justice, and organizing and resistance. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, workshops, theme panels, film screenings, artistic interventions, and other formats.

Graduate students who want to be considered for the Brian Murphy Student Paper Award should submit a full paper along with their abstract.